ABOUT William

William deBuys is a writer and conservationist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of The Walk and River of Traps, coauthored with photographer Alex Harris, which was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a 1990 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. DeBuys’s other books are Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, which received a Western States Book Award, Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell, A Great Aridness, and The Last Unicorn. His shorter work has appeared in many publications, including Story, Orion, and the New York Times Book Review.

Read William’s conversation through letters with David James Duncan in Orion Magazine.

DeBuys’ instructional philosophy, in his words:

Writing is both art and craft. I doubt that much about the art of writing can be taught—the muses confer their inspiration or hold it back in different ways for different people. But craft is a different matter. The writer’s toolbox invites our attention, and with practice we can learn to use its contents better. Narrative tension, the magic of voice, the importance of strong verbs, word placement, and telling detail—these “elements of style” and many others can expand our expressive possibilities, just as different kinds of chisels and saws broaden what a carpenter can do. Sometimes just identifying a tool and giving it a name can help a student start to use it. I also like to emphasize that reading well is vitally important: the prose of great writers helps us train our inner ear to recognize the sound of a good sentence, to know the qualities we want to impart to our own work. And then we come back to the question of art, and the strategies we employ to make ourselves more available to the muses’ intervention. Beyond that, there is only practice, practice, and more practice. With a modicum of encouragement, the committed writer will write any way and anyway.